Standpoint: Using Bourdieu to Understand IE and the Researcher’s Relation with Knowledge Generation

Abstract In this chapter, I highlight the need to turn the institutional ethnography (IE) lens of enquiry onto IE itself, and consequently, the importance for institutional ethnographers to attend to their standpoint in taking up and activating their understanding of IE. Many, including Wise and Stanley (1990) and Walby (2007), celebrate Smith’s sociology but raise important ontological and epistemological questions about IE’s own recursive power. While IE has developed from a critique of wider sociological inquiry, it is troubled by the institutional ethnographer’s own standpont when using IE uncritically, without reflexivity of their standpoint in relation with IE and knowledge generation. IE stands in relation between the researcher and the everyday of the research participants in a local research context that is particular and plural, situated and dynamic. The chapter highlights a particular critique by Dorothy Smith of Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus as a “blobontology,” yet considers the theoretical similarities between Smith and Bourdieu. I argue that institutional ethnographers and IE itself are not be immune from the kinds of unravelling that Smith undertakes of other approaches to sociological inquiry. Researcher standpoint, reflexivity, and their relation to knowledge generation are therefore critical aspects of approach without which there is potential to “other” and develop morally questionable representations of people that diminishes the actuality of their subjective experience.